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From operator to entrepreneur: David Garcia applies outage management lessons
David Garcia
If ComEd’s Zion plant in northern Illinois hadn’t closed in 1998, David Garcia might still be there, where he got his start in nuclear power as an operator at age 24.
But in his ninth year working there, Zion closed, and Garcia moved on to a series of new roles—including at Wisconsin’s Point Beach plant, the corporate offices of Minnesota’s Xcel Energy, and on the supplier side at PaR Nuclear—into an on-the-job education that he augmented with degrees in business and divinity that he sought later in life.
Garcia started his own company—Waymaker Resource Group—in 2014. Recently, Waymaker has been supporting Holtec’s restart project at the Palisades plant with staffing and analysis. Palisades sits almost exactly due east of the fully decommissioned Zion site on the other side of Lake Michigan and is poised to operate again after what amounts to an extended outage of more than three years. Holtec also plans to build more reactors at the same site.
For Garcia, the takeaway is clear: “This industry is not going away. Nuclear power and the adjacent industries that support nuclear power—and clean energy, period—are going to be needed for decades upon decades.”
In July, Garcia talked with Nuclear News staff writer Susan Gallier about his career and what he has learned about running successful outages and other projects.
Zoran Dragojlovic, Farrokh Najmabadi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 4 | May 2005 | Pages 1152-1159
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Inertial Fusion Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A842
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The rep rate of an inertial fusion energy facility depends on the time-dependent response of the chamber environment between target ignitions. The fusion burn following the target ignition releases large quantities of energy into the chamber. This energy should be removed and the environment should be returned to a quiescent state so that the new fusion target can be positioned for the next cycle. Understanding the hydrodynamic transport of this energy through the chamber fill gas is essential because the multidimensional geometry effects become important on the long time scale, as the fluid interacts with the vessel wall containing various beam access ports. This interaction affects several different modes of the chamber species transport, including convection induced by shock waves and secondary flow, molecular diffusion, electron conductivity and radiation. In order to investigate these phenomena, we have developed SPARTAN code as an assembly of algorithms that were the most suitable for an accurate treatment of the computational problem, such as shock wave resolution and tracking, underlying flow physics and complex wall geometry. This study demonstrates that the geometry effects are critical in affecting the flow during the first 50 milliseconds following the target ignition. Thermal diffusion by molecules and free electrons has only a moderate effect in reducing the temperature extrema and is not sufficient to cool down the chamber to the equilibrium with the chamber wall within 100 ms. Radiation of the background plasma was identified as the only transport mechanism that has approached to this goal, making the chamber environment more suitable for inserting the next target.